


Songs of the Unrequited

by bethfrish



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-16
Updated: 2005-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/933994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethfrish/pseuds/bethfrish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silly boys. As if they know what love is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Songs of the Unrequited

Marius shows up at Courfeyrac's at nine in the evening with nothing but his hat under his arm. 

"I've come to sleep at your place," he says, looking at Courfeyrac expectantly. He blinks. It isn't a question. 

Courfeyrac steps aside and ushers him into the room, then goes to the table and pours a glass of wine. Marius sits and stares off into space while drinking it, shoulders hunched, elbows on the table. 

Courfeyrac stands in front of his bed, thinking for a moment, before pushing the covers aside and pulling one of the mattresses off and onto the floor. He crouches and pushes it into the corner, then digs around in a drawer and finds a clean sheet to throw on top. 

"There you are," he tells Marius, still seated quietly at the table even though his wine is gone. 

Marius turns and rises from his chair. "Thank you." He goes and lies down, still fully dressed, and remains silent for the rest of the night. 

Courfeyrac never asks what made Marius show up at his door, and Marius never offers to tell him. 

  
  
  
  


Marius is rarely around during the day. Courfeyrac has no idea where he goes. 

Sometimes, with the daily absences of the one and the nightly meetings of the other, they go days at a time without even speaking to one another. Courfeyrac comes home in the dead of night to find Marius asleep and alone, nothing but a dark silhouette against the wall. 

On the rare evenings that they're both home at the same time, Courfeyrac invites Marius to join him for dinner. He talks about the progress they're making, and how Enjolras periodically asks if Marius will rejoin them. Marius stares off in the distance and doesn't even try to pretend that he's listening. He eats his soup and chews his bread and sighs continually through the one-sided conversation. Courfeyrac keeps talking anyway. 

After the bill is paid, they rise from the table and go their separate ways. Courfeyrac has fifteen minutes to get to the Café Musain before Enjolras gets angry and turns that unsightly shade of condescending. But first he watches his companion's retreating form, wandering off in the other direction. He isn't heading back home. Maybe, Courfeyrac thinks, he isn't really heading anywhere. 

  
  
  
  


One morning the sunlight that streams in through the window hits Courfeyrac square in the face, and the instant he blinks awake, all chances of slumber ever returning have spontaneously disappeared. Sighing, he rolls over to find that Marius is still asleep, breathing into the pillow and tangled in the sheets so that one bare leg is left uncovered. 

Courfeyrac gets up quietly and scratches his chest through his nightshirt. The narrow beam of sunlight streaming in through the window still leaves Marius blanketed in the darkness of his corner. Courfeyrac once offered to take the floor instead, but when he came home that night Marius was already curled up in his place, faded trousers folded up neatly on the floor next to his head. 

There's one egg left on the table. Courfeyrac decides to leave it for Marius and breakfasts on some bread that's leftover from the day before. Sitting at the table, he shifts his chair casually so that he can see Marius' bed in his peripheral vision. The boy is in desperate need of a haircut, hair falling over his eyes in thick, dark curls. Courfeyrac thinks he looks almost desolately angelic asleep like that, his passions dancing about in his head where Courfeyrac can’t see them. He watches as his eyelids twitch and his lashes flutter, and wonders what a man like Marius dreams about. 

Courfeyrac almost never remembers his own dreams. 

  
  
  
  


He decides, after a while, that Marius must be in love. 

Then he decides that the sentiment must not be returned, because he has never, in his life, seen a man pine so desperately the way Marius does. Forgetting to eat, disappearing without saying goodbye, resurfacing at odd hours with the same withered expression he had on when he left. It disturbs Courfeyrac to think that a woman could be capable of such bodily destruction, such mental deterioration. He averts his eyes when he comes home to find Marius staring at the wall. 

Courfeyrac has been with twenty-seven different women, not all of whom would have the honor of being called his mistress. Sometimes he stays with a girl as long as a month, others he wakes up beside in the late hours of the morning without remembering how he got there, and immediately begins to hatch an escape plan. Once he even had a six-person orgy with Laigle, Bahorel, and the three women they'd met not an hour before. He awoke the next morning with a bruise on his hip from falling asleep on the floor, and a sour taste in his mouth from the spice of too much wine and the salt of too many people's skin. 

Even so, Courfeyrac rarely forgets the women he sleeps with. His first mistress, Marcella, had eyes like puddles of dirty water in the rain, so sad and beautiful that it hurt to see his own reflection cast in them. Simone had skin so soft he shuddered to touch it, yet constantly yearned to have it touch him. Then there was Camille, whose lips were the color of strawberries just before they turn rotten, so full and so perfect that he'd do anything she asked, merely to see her smile. 

Courfeyrac thinks that Marius has eyes like Marcella and skin like Simone and lips like Camille. 

Courfeyrac isn't sure that he's ever been in love. 

  
  
  
  


One night Courfeyrac comes back from the Café Musain to find Marius sitting at the table, staring at one of his translations. The candle's dwindled down to almost nothing, but Marius doesn't seem to notice. 

Courfeyrac sets his books down in the corner and moves behind his chair. "Why don't you go to bed, Marius," he tells him. Also not a question. 

Marius turns in his seat and stands without meeting Courfeyrac's gaze. "All right," he says blandly. 

Marius goes over to his bed and starts to undo the buttons of his trousers, but Courfeyrac comes up behind him and grabs his wrist. "Let me," he says quietly against his neck, slipping his other hand beneath the waistband of Marius' pants. 

Marius stills at the touch, letting Courfeyrac untuck his shirt and slide his trousers down past his hips. Courfeyrac doesn't say anything else, just plants kiss after kiss against the back of Marius' neck, in his hair and on his shoulders, holding him protectively against his own tense body. Marius breathes heavily, bracing himself against the wall with one arm as his hair falls over his face. When he finally shudders and goes limp, Courfeyrac catches him in his arms, running the fingers of his one clean hand over the boy's trembling shoulder. 

After a moment, Marius turns around in his hold and looks at Courfeyrac through sweaty tendrils of hair. Courfeyrac swallows and arches against him helplessly. When Marius doesn't react, he backs away and retreats to his own bed. 

The next morning, Courfeyrac awakens to find Marius standing over him. As the night before begins to flood his memory in waves of embarrassment and disbelief, he starts making up excuses in his head; that he'd had too much to drink, that he wasn't in his right mind, that he hadn't been with anyone in so long— 

Marius clears his throat and asks to borrow five francs. 

Courfeyrac sits up in bed and scratches at his arm. "Of course," he finally tells him. He pretends to look around for his trousers so that he doesn't have to see his reflection in the boy's sad, dull eyes. 


End file.
